In many contexts, an enterprise or other stakeholder may be required and/or may desire to keep track of and/or exercise control over network or other communications, e.g., communications among employees of a corporation and/or between such employees and third parties, such as the corporation's customers and/or members of the general public. The requirements of the Securities and Exchange Commission, National Association of Securities Dealers, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, and various anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws are among the many legal and regulatory requirements that may give rise to a need on the part of a corporation or other entity to be able to monitor, record, archive, index, retrieve, analyze, and/or control employee (or other user) communications.
The task of monitoring and controlling communications is made more challenging by the proliferation in recent years of communication technologies, such as chat, instant messaging, and short message service (SMS) technology (the basic text character form of which is sometimes referred to as “text messaging”, e.g., via a mobile phone or other mobile device), and technologies related to SMS such as Enhanced Message Service (EMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS), which enable longer messages and rich, multimedia content such as video to be sent. Data messaging technologies that use a mobile network, such as SMS and other mobile network-based messaging technologies, can present a particular challenge, because the equipment used to receive, process, and deliver a message may depend on the geographic location of the user at the time the user sends the message. As a result, in a typical prior art mobile network it is not uncommon for mobile data messages to be delivered via a communication path that does not include any equipment through which the mobile data message transits and/or on which a copy of the mobile data message persists such as may be suitable and/or convenient to enable a communication policy to be applied to the mobile data message.
Furthermore, some data messaging technologies use available bandwidth on a communication channel to opportunistically transmit data messages, e.g., at times when the communication channel is not busy transferring data associated with a primary type of communication for which the communication channel primarily is used. For example, mobile telephones and associated service provider infrastructure are used, or at least were provided originally, primarily to support full duplex voice communication between two or more stations, at least one of them being (or being capable of being) mobile (e.g., wireless). SMS messaging and related technologies opportunistically use available bandwidth on mobile communication channels to allow users to send and/or receive secondary data messages, such as text messages. Such secondary messages may be stored by a service provider until an opportunity arises to forward them to their intended recipient, e.g., once the recipient comes into range of an element of the mobile network and/or turns their mobile equipment on. Even if a way were provided to archive, monitor, and/or control the primary type of communications on such networks, the approach used for the primary type of communication may not be suitable for performing such functions with respect to the secondary data messaging traffic. Also, different rules may apply to the different types of communication, e.g., to the extent the secondary data communication is considered to be a communication “in writing” and/or may be more likely to persist, be forwarded, etc.
Therefore, there is a need for an effective way to monitor and/or control communications via data messages, including without limitation communications made using mobile and/or secondary data messaging technology.